Crossing Yangon River
By Sunil Amrith
At Pansodan Jetty, I am ushered into the Manager’s office by two youths. An old man, longyi-clad, asks us to sign a ledger, and writes out painstakingly two tickets: to Dalah and back. The journey takes all of ten minutes. We exchange a few words in Tamil; “I am Tamil,” he says, “but born in Burma.” Out of historian’s habit, too ready to see locked drawers as archival stashes, I wonder what materials are contained in his office.
The rickety ferry that takes us across the river is at least thirty years old—quite possibly much older than that. Once they were run by the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. Vendors of everything roam the decks. An old Muslim man operates a makeshift wheelchair attached to a bicycle. Young men hawk DVDs of the comedian Zargana—released from prison only in 2012—and of Aung San Suu Kyi’s speeches. Everything is as it was, yet things in Myanmar are completely different.
The ferry is full of commuters, but the container port hosts only a few ships. Surely that is set to change—Myanmar beckons to the world’s hungry investors.
The purpose of my trip is to see Dalah which, on the account of my nineteenth century sources, was a thriving shipyard. Already by 1890 Dalah, across the river from Rangoon, had developed into a thriving dry dock and repair station: “here also were situated Boiler Shops, Erecting Shops, Machine Shops, Carpenters Shops and all the other type of shops which go to make up a shipyard.”
Today it bears little trace of that history. It is an unremarkable place with a somewhat abandoned air to it. For a moment, I imagine making a tour of the Bay of Bengal’s once-great now-forgotten ports: Dalah and Nagapatnam and Masulipatnam. A project for another time, perhaps.